[3] The modern Kets lived along the eastern middle stretch of the river before being assimilated politically into Russia between the 17th and 19th centuries.

It is suggested that parts of the Altaians are predominantly of Yeniseian origin and closely related to the Ket people.

They were officially recognized as Kets in the 1930s when the Soviet Union began to implement the self-definition policy for indigenous peoples.

In 1788, Peter Simon Pallas was the earliest scholar to publish observations about the Ket language in a travel diary.

[16] The Kets have a rich and varied culture, filled with an abundance of Siberian mythology, including shamanistic practices and oral traditions.

In the 1950s, Mircea Eliade states this in the first sentence of his book Shamanism: "Since the beginning of the 20th century, ethnologists have fallen into the habit of using the terms 'shaman', 'medicine man', 'sorcerer', and 'magician' interchangeably to designate certain individuals possessing magico-religious powers and found in all 'primitive' societies.

If the word 'shaman' is taken to mean any magician, sorcerer, medicine man, or ecstatic found throughout the history of religion and religious ethnology, we arrive at a notion at once extremely complex and extremely vague; it seems, furthermore, to serve no purpose, for we already have the terms 'magician' or 'sorcerer' to express notions as unlike and ill-defined as 'primitive magic' or 'primitive mysticism'.

"[17] The shamans of the Ket people have been identified as practitioners of healing as well as other local ritualistic spiritual practices.

Supposedly, there were several types of Ket shamans,[18][19] differing in function (sacral rites, curing), power, and associated animals (deer, bear).

"[28] Kets regard their spirit images as household deities, which sleep in the daytime and protect them at night.

Other authors have discussed analogies (similar folklore motifs, purely typological considerations, and certain binary pairs in symbolics) may be related to a dualistic organization of society - some dualistic features can be found in comparisons with these peoples.

[36] There are some reports of a division into two exogamous patrilinear moieties,[38] folklore on conflicts of mythological figures, and cooperation of two beings in the creation of the land,[37] the motif of the earth-diver.

Some people included as reference are Matthias Castrén, Vasiliy Ivanovich Anuchin, Kai Donner, Hans Findeisen, and Yevgeniya Alekseyevna Alekseyenko.

1913 photographs by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen: Media related to Ket people at Wikimedia Commons